Digital Media Buzz > Streaming Media East 2009: Promoting Ease-of-Use Tools

Streaming Media East 2009: Promoting Ease-of-Use Tools

By Ron Shulkin

Streaming Media East 2009 was an exciting show with more than 3,400 participants and more than 50 vendors represented on the exhibit floor. There were several recurring themes this year, all of them trending toward providing easier-to-use products for content creation, content management and content distribution.

The trend toward ease of use supports a democratization of technology, enabling anyone to create and distribute multimedia content and making it easier for large organizations to support infrastructures. This is in sync with Web 2.0 philosophies of putting “the social” in social networking and provisioning user generated content.

Digital media, including streaming video, has been the traditional purview of audio/video technical specialists. In the past, producers of content needed to be able to encode the video, combine video and audio with other content (like PowerPoint, polls, pdfs, etc.) and provide distribution to content delivery networks. This required a variety of skill sets not available to the average person. If experts wanted to produce a multi-media message to share their insights with an audience, they required the help of an expert in technology.

The vendors at SME all spoke to the introduction of easy-to-use creation software tools. This enables user generated content in a way not available in the past. And the timing is perfect because there is a strong demand for good content.

For example, Interactive Video Technologies offers their Studio product. This is a self service content creation tool. It has been enabled recently with the latest versions of Flash from Adobe. The new revisions of Flash don’t require encoding and are enable with PowerPoint. Greg Pulier, the CTO at IVT, sees the future of webcasting including “unified platforms for employees to create, share and consume rich media, making it trivial to record with PowerPoint and share with selected groups.”

Qumu, another vendor of content creation tools, typically has its products installed behind the firewall in enterprise deployments at big companies. They too have just introduced a desktop tool, Qumu Kodiak; however they rely on the Windows Media format. Not a surprise as Qumu has a product suite that is tightly integrated with Microsoft’s Silverlight. 

Other content creation vendors are leaning toward the use of appliances. Sonic Foundry’s MediaSite, widely installed at educational institution classrooms and corporate boardrooms, uses a simple automation device that enables content to be created that is ready for distribution without the need for pre- or post-production. 

Along with the ease of use for content creation comes the requirement from the marketplace for easier access to media. If you think about it for a moment, once you have an ever increasing number of videos to watch, you need a way to search through them to find the one you want. This is addressed in several ways; with portals or catalogs, with searchable meta data and with more user friendly playing environments.

The delivery models are also changing. Verizon presented a new program tying the Internet’s media content as presented on television. Joe Ambeault, Verizon’s director of product development and management, video services, told an audience of about 200 at his keynote address that there are some inherent challenges to this new delivery. Viewers want to be able to operate the Internet content like they manage television, with options for TV guide-like search and the ability to change channels. The most striking attribute of this Verizon test was the full involvement of the Verizon team and the full solicitation of feedback from the viewing community. This was a project thoroughly influenced by enlightened social networking participants.

Lastly, along with content creation and delivery, is content management. This area is also being enhanced with ease of use. Publishers are looking for controls and easier-to-use tools. Corporations don’t want their employees to offer messaging without any company controls. During the SME show, I heard about one large company who put into place two full-time employees to search out videos on YouTube and delete them. If there is a company message, they want to control what it is.

 Many of the vendors look for automatic integration with their proprietary products or third-party environments like Microsoft’s Silverlight. Certain reliability is the goal so that media infrastructures can be treated like any other system within the information technology department. This means good reports providing measurable and actionable information about usage and availability.

Most of the new technology at Streaming Media East is provided as a Software as a Service rather than enterprise (behind the firewall) deployments. This means the software company can more easily maintain and upgrade its technology remotely. 

AT&T Services brings a customer service-oriented vision. The technology is typically integrated with the publisher’s Customer Management System and Learning Management System as well as being highly available, scalable and offering embedded players. Their managed service comes with multiple outputs (digital signage, SharePoint or Websphere) making it easier for the publisher to pay attention to their customer rather than babysitting the technology.

Streaming Media East brought content creation technology vendors face to face with streaming video users. Responding to new demands for User Generated Content, and taking advantage of improvements in the available technology, these vendors are enabling content creators with easy to use, friendly tools. Most streaming media shows have two audiences, publishers (which are mostly media and entertainment companies) and corporate (using rich media for internal training and external marketing). This year their interests overlap in the pursuit of technologies to produce content in streamlined fashions.

Ron Shulkin focuses on how to make Web 2.0 know-how available to large organizations in order to make their customer information measurable and actionable.

*EXTRA*

To get a crasher’s perspective on the show, view Air America’s BreakRoomLive.com video where co-host Sam Seder searches for a danish and coffee at Streaming Media East 2009.